Premiere Freezes & Crashes, Totally Unusable!

Premiere freezes and randomly crashes with no warning whatsoever. Task Manager cannot end it, Alt+F4 does nothing; the only solution is restarting my PC.

I added 1080p 60 fps video to the timeline. Tried sequence fps at 30 and 59.94; no difference. Cleared Media Cache and Auto-Save folder. Attempted to set Renderer to Software Only; cannot change. Updated Premiere; the problem persists.

Premiere should have played the video smoothly on the timeline and allowed me to edit without issues.

The program froze with no warning, CPU and RAM usage dropped to near 0%, and it could not be closed with any keys or Task Manager. The only solution was restarting the PC.

No, only standard Premiere installation; no codec packs or plugins present on the system.

CPU: Intel Core i5-12400F 2.5GHz, 12 cores
RAM: 16 GB DDR4 3200 MHz
GPU: ASUS Radeon TUF RX 6800 16GB
SSD: 500GB WD SN570 (system), 2TB external SSD (videos)
OS: Windows 11 Pro, latest updates installed